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Kate Mulvany recently spent three weeks in a Wagga motel room
wrestling with her family history, the effects of war and an
unexpected deadline.

Told that she had been shortlisted for the 2004 Philip Parsons
Young Playwright's Award, the actor and playwright was given three
weeks to submit a play synopsis to win the award while touring for
a theatre production.

"I had to provide character breakdown, plot breakdown, a
five-page scene and the themes and issues that were going to be
explored in the play," Mulvany, 27, said. "And I was stuck in a
motel room with no internet access so I couldn't do any
research."

Yesterday the British playwright David Hare presented Mulvany
with the Philip Parsons Young Playwright's Award at Belvoir Street
Theatre. It provides the winner with a $10,000 writer's commission
for Company B's B Sharp season.

Mulvany said she turned to the unexpected and tragic effect of
war on three generations of her family for inspiration.

Titled The Seed, her winning synopsis tells of an
impassioned IRA-supporting Irishman living in England who is
visited by his Australian-based son and granddaughter on the
threesome's shared birthday after years of estrangement.

"The granddaughter is born with cancer because of the Agent
Orange her father was exposed to in Vietnam," Mulvany said.

"The grandfather's on his last legs, the father is a little bit
crazy and the daughter has just found out she can't have
children."

But Mulvany

did not want the play to be pure tragedy.

"There's also the Irish humour infused with the English
working-class humour infused with the laconic Australian humour,
and I wanted to get all of that in it as well."

Mulvany, who has worked with Sydney Theatre Company, Company B
Belvoir and Ensemble Theatre and most recently appeared in Debra
Oswald's Mr Bailey's Minder at The Stables Theatre, said she
had long thought about basing a play on her family's history.

"My grandfather was an IRA supporter, my father migrated to
Australia and got conscripted to Vietnam and I was born with
cancer," she said. "It feels right to write about it now."